Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Seelan: The following letter was sent to the Singapore Police Force complaining against The Online Citizen for 'publicly defaming our leaders'. I reproduce the letter on my blog and urge other bloggers to do the same. Is Ms Janet Wee going to report on all of us?

The following is an email by a certain “Janet Wee’ which was sent to the Singapore Police Force and copied to The Online Citizen. Her email is also addressed to several other people, including MM Lee Kuan Yew, the Attorney-General, Mr Jeremy Au Yeong of the Straits Times, Google, among others.

We publish Ms Wee’s email in full here without edit.

Hi Singapore Police Force,

I will like to bring to your attention a seditious article by a well-known anti-government blog – The Online Citizen published yesterday which was aggregated on Google News:

The title of the article is: “Lee Kuan Yew had suggested “instigating riots and disorder” to crushopposition”

The article contains seditious remarks about Mr Lee which are unproven and accuse Mr Lee of creating social unrest in Singapore in order to achieve his political motives.

As Google News has a wide readership, the damage done to Mr Lee’s image and reputation is great.

I have already written to Google News to take down the article, but they have refused to do so. Hence I have no choice but to lodge a complaint to you.

The Online Citizen is hosted by a web server company in Utah, Bluehost.com. You can write in to them to take down the site for infringing the terms of service.

The Managing Editor of The Online Citizen is Mr Leong Sze Hian, a Financial advisor known to be very critical of the Singapore government. Another opposition leader involved are Mr Tan Kin Lian andMr Kenneth Jeyaretnam of the Reform Party.

Please investigate the matter as we cannot allow our leaders to be defamed publicly by these bloggers.

This email has been forwarded to Mr Lee and the AG Chambers for their attention.

It is hard to inculcate a nation of innovative and creative thinkers when there are still such people around who thwart free speech under guise of "sedition" and "libel". Can't have creativity without freedom of expression. Sigh...No wonder Singapore needs to bring in hordes of foreigners at Astar and NUS to help out.